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Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Who were Jesus’ Good Soldiers?

You
must not follow a crowd in doing evil things. (Exod 23:2)

Take your share of suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. (2
Tim 2:3)

You will recognize them by their fruit. (Matt 7:6)

I have been involved
in a discussion with Christians I otherwise highly respect in regard
to the defense given by the soldiers who killed the Jews in the
concentration camps. After forty years of believing that “I was
just following orders” was morally invalid, I find myself listening
to seminary-trained Christian leaders saying that the only people
guilty of the Holocaust were those at the top who issued the orders –
the people who actually did the killing were innocent because they
were indeed just following orders.

I can’t just
dismiss their argument out of hand. I have recently read Treblinka,
the autobiography of Chil Rajchman, one of the few Jews to escape the
Treblinka death camp. He was able to survive by deceiving the Germans
into thinking he was a barber, and so spent his days of captivity
shearing naked women before they were stuffed into the gas chambers.
When there were no women to shear, he helped dispose of corpses.
While the physical and emotional
agony drove most of Rajchman’s co-workers to suicide, he lasted
months, escaped during
the revolt, and managed to stay hidden until the war was over.

If
I consider it OK for Rajchman to become a barber to survive the
Holocaust, why should I condemn Calvinists and other German
evangelicals for donning the uniform of the Reich as a survival
strategy? After all, Rajchman was just following orders. And if I
don’t condemn Rajchman, why do I hassle US evangelicals for joining
Uncle Sam’s army and fighting his wars?

The
best I can do is to say that the soldiers were being paid; Rajchman
was running as fast as he could to escape the Grim Reaper, so he
incurred no guilt. Therefore, to the degree the soldiers were
conscripts, they were also staying out of range of the Reaper.

But
I don’t find even that satisfactory. There were non-Jewish Germans
who refused to join the Wehrmacht: Jehovah’s
Witnesses. Rather than following the crowd to
do evil, they were suffering for what they would call their Christian
faith. Maybe there were Calvinist guards who treated the doomed Jews
with some sort of unusual courtesy – I can’t even imagine what
that would mean – but I can’t imagine Rajchman saying that he
regarded them more highly than he did the Witnesses who were
interned.

So I ask you: is
Jesus more pleased with those who endured suffering rather than
participating in evil, or is he more pleased with those who were
“just following orders”?

“Well,” I hear
you say, “to the degree that the Calvinists truly trusted Christ
they were saved, and Jehovah’s Witnesses are lost because they
don’t believe that Jesus is God, so yes, he was more pleased with
the Calvinists. They were obeying Romans 13 by just following orders.
You don’t believe that Rajchman was saved, do you?”

OK, you’ve got me
there: salvation, reconciliation with God, comes through Christ
alone. So if Rajchman has rejected Jesus, he is not saved; his sins
against God are worse than the Nazis’ sins against him, and even
the suffering he endured at Treblinka cannot wash those sins away.
While I seriously question the wholesale writing off of Jehovah’s
Witnesses, I’ll assume for the sake of argument here that they are
not saved either. Whether guilty or not, God’s people are
instrumental in the progress of evil while his enemies suffer it. Are
you happy now?

For that matter,
given that paradigm, should we even call the Holocaust evil? I’ve
never yet heard a Christian deny that God was working out his eternal
purposes through the Holocaust, so if God is working out his
purposes, is it really evil? If “the king’s heart is in the hand
of the Lord like channels of water; he turns it wherever he wants”
(Prov 21:1), then government leaders are themselves “just following
orders,” are they not? If the soldiers who actually did the dirty
work have not incurred guilt because they were “just following
orders,” how can even the government leaders have incurred guilt?
If there is no human guilt, and God is by definition good and
therefore innocent of guilt, then who is guilty? If no one is guilty,
then how can the Holocaust be evil? Can we not only say that it just
was, like
the death of krill eaten by a whale?

Maybe you can live in
that kind of universe, but I can’t.

On the other hand, if every person is always a moral agent who will
“be paid back according to what he has done while in the body,
whether good or evil” (2 Cor 5:10), we cannot follow the crowd to
do evil and then claim innocence because we were “just following
orders.” We have to evaluate the morality of every decree of those
with power over us and decide whether or not we need to “obey God
rather than people” (Acts 5:29).

The only government
decree I remember hearing any Christians say they could not obey is
some variant of “deny Jesus,” like “say, ‘Caesar is lord’”
or “don’t preach Christ.” But according to my seminary-trained
interlocutors stuffing naked Jews into gas chambers is OK for
soldiers because doing so is “just following orders.” It wouldn’t
be OK for private citizens to do this, of course, but following the
order of a lawful authority is OK.

My response is that
if God has not commanded us in the Bible to kill people – that is,
the likes of murderers and kidnappers (let’s pass on the question
of sexual deviants for now) – we incur guilt by killing them. It’s
that simple. Nowhere in Scripture are we admonished to round up Jews,
Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or anyone else who otherwise respects
their neighbors’ bodies and property and imprison them, let alone
kill them. To do so is to disobey God to obey man – to proclaim
Hitler as lord more loudly than by uttering the words. It would be
better to suffer with the oppressed, as Corrie ten Boom’s family
did. If our first priority is the spread of the gospel, it is to such
as they – not to the thousands (I’m guessing here) of Calvinist
Wehrmacht soldiers – we can point today as evidence that our God is
good.

When it comes to
today’s evangelical church in the US, to whom will our
grandchildren point to support their claims that God is good? Will
they point to the thousands of soldiers who put themselves at the
beck and call of a man who called the Constitution he swore to uphold
“a piece of g*dd*m paper”? Who appointed the Supreme Court Chief
Justice who gave us ObamaCare? Who bailed out the richest people in
the world at the expense of the rest of us? And another who arrogated
to himself the task of killing his own subjects with no judicial
oversight? Will they look back and be glad that today’s Calvinists
not only followed the orders issued by these men but prayed for them
as well (see Rom 1:32)?

Or will they wonder
why there were so few Micaiahs and Jeremiahs who questioned the
morality of the policies those men promoted and warned the church to
stay away from them?